Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Back in 2003, I wrote ‘Where Do You Get
Your Ideas From?’, an editorial for Aurealis #31, where I interviewed a number
of Australian speculative fiction authors about the well-spring of their
creativity. The answers, which you can read here
were diverse but also shared a common thread -- the ability to be open to the
world around us and to recognise the potential of what we find.

A recent article by Christine Aschwanden on
Writer
Unboxed reveals how studies in Artificial Intelligence, are developing an
emergent idea of creativity. The Picbreeder
site uses an algorithm called NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT)
developed by AI researcher Kenneth Stanley. NEAT presents a matrix of random
shapes; viewers select one, which then generates a new matrix of ‘child
shapes’, and the process is repeated. Through this continuing interaction it’s
quite common that recognisable images are created, but it’s only in hindsight
that the emergence of the image is obvious. There’s an interplay here between
the random shape generation of NEAT and the choices made by the viewer. No human
action is entirely random; there is, at the very least, an unconscious
aesthetic guiding the viewer’s picture selection. But it’s not as if the viewer
can set out to create a specific image of, say, a butterfly, because NEAT makes
it impossible for that degree of planning to manifest in the end result

Psychologists are now theorising that the
Picbreeder results provide a good roadmap for how creativity works. The artist
is presented with a given ‒ maybe a piece of wood, maybe the view out their
window, maybe a story setting, character or situation. The choices they make
incrementally create new options, which they react to in an intrinsic way,
perhaps guided by their sense of shape or colour, or what feels right in the
context of the story they are creating. That reaction then impresses itself on
the work, which gives rise to another reaction, and on and on in a feedback
loop of discovery.

It’s a common theme in discussions with
writers that the book they think they are writing at the outset is not what it
ultimately becomes. The book finds its true meaning along the way. In my own
writing, I’m constantly amazed by how flexible story structure is. How it can
bend and flex to allow for unintentional detours. And just how vital and
exciting the changes that emerge from this process can be. That’s not to say a
detailed plot outline isn’t helpful to some writers. But if we can at the same
time be open to our instinctual feel for the potential of the new and
different, perhaps that’s where true creativity emerges.

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SF quotes

"the Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture."— Iain M. Banks